Why Cloud Is Driving Innovation and a Must-Do for Midsize Organizations

Midsize organizations have an enormous opportunity to leverage cloud computing to drive innovation and improve their competitive position. Cloud computing—whether private, hybrid or public—enables organizations to be far more agile while reducing IT costs and operational expenses. In addition, cloud models enable organizations to embrace the digital transformation necessary to remain competitive in the future.

Cloud computing levels the playing field for midsize organizations. With the cloud, midsize businesses can leverage the same technologies as much larger organizations without the burden of investing in expensive data center resources and highly skilled IT personnel. Businesses in all industries are using cloud computing to support new business models. Prominent examples include Uber in transportation, Netflix in home entertainment, and Amazon in retailing.

Every company in every industry can benefit from the agility and economic advantages the cloud enables. But as the saying goes, you’ve got to be in it to win it. If your organization is not using cloud, you may not be able to embrace the digital transformation that is affecting most industries. Here are some of the key reasons why cloud is a must-do for midsize organizations:

Reduces costs: Cloud enables midsize organizations to reduce IT costs—if they take the time to understand the models and how to best deploy them for specific workloads and applications. In addition, costs can be more predictable, which helps midsize organizations manage their budgeting processes with greater accuracy.

Increases agility: Cloud models enable organizations to move much more quickly when developing new business services and mobile applications, while empowering business teams and line-of-business managers with shared resources, self-service capabilities, elastic scalability and automatic chargebacks.

Improves productivity: Organizations can significantly ease the burden on their internal IT teams by leveraging a public cloud deployment model or services-based models such as platform as a service, infrastructure as a service or software as a service. Instead of building infrastructure, with all the requisite expenses, training, maintenance and so on, IT teams can purchase services.

Reduces complexity: One of the biggest challenges with maintaining legacy data centers is that they are increasingly complex and siloed. This means they are expensive to maintain and limited in terms of supporting business agility. Shifting to a cloud model, particularly a public cloud or private cloud as a service, makes it much simpler to manage IT. It also makes it much easier to upgrade and deploy new technologies as they become available, enabling you to future-proof your organization.

Enables change: The world is changing whether you are ready or not. Digital transformation is real, and it must be part of your strategy no matter what your company size. Advances such as increased mobility, big data analytics, social networking and the Internet of Things are driving innovation across all industries, including yours. You can’t afford to let the world pass you by.

This is a transformative time for businesses of all sizes. Technology is allowing organizations to create new business models and efficiencies—and cloud computing is at the heart of this transformation. For midsize businesses, the cloud represents an opportunity to leverage leading-edge technologies and shift to a services-based model for IT.

Making this move can make a huge difference, particularly for organizations that may not have large IT staffs or deep expertise in all of the critical areas of IT, such as storage, networking and databases. For midsize businesses, cloud computing is not just the future of IT, it is also the present. Now’s the time to get started.